Effect of Motion Correction for CCTA in Quantifying the Pericoronary Adipose Tissue

Objective: To explore the effect of the motion correction in quantifying the pericoronary adipose tissue (PCAT) of coronary CT angiography (CCTA). Methods Forty patients who underwent CCTA were retrospectively enrolled in this study. Two CCTA series were reconstructed without motion correction (MC) and with motion correction. The image qualities were evaluated using a five-point Likert scale rating system. The right coronary artery (RCA) and PCAT were segmented. Volume of RCA, volume of PCAT and the fat attenuation index (FAI) were calculated and compared using paired sample t-test between two series. Pearson’s correlation analyses were performed to access the correlations between the image quality change and 3 parameters changes, respectively. The radiomics features of PCAT were also extracted and compared. Results The image qualities were significantly improved (without MC vs with MC, the percent of image quality score > 3, 52% vs 84%, p  < 0.001). The volume of RCA was significantly increased after motion correction ( p  < 0.05), while FAI and the volume of PCAT were not. Besides, the changes of the volume of RCA and the volume of PCAT had significantly positive correlation with image quality change due to motion correction, while FAI change was not. Meanwhile, 521 of 1218 radiomics features of PCAT were significantly affected by motion correction. Conclusion Reconstruction with MC algorithm could improve the CCTA image quality, and had a significant impact on the quantization of PCAT.